AVG update disguises LinkScanner traffic as IE6

Earlier this month, AVG was pointed to as the source of a new bandwidth hog on the Internet with one of their fancier anti-malware tools causing a huge jump in traffic on popular sites. At least admins were able to identify what was going on and filter out the nonsense traffic under this scenario. However, AVG has made things more difficult with a recent update in which its LinkScanner program disguises itself as IE6.

That's an unfortunate step for network administrators looking for an easy way to filter out the bogus traffic coming from the tool. According to AVG, the steps were to make the program more difficult for malware sites to detect and thus defeat the purpose of LinkScanner altogether. They still claim that admins will be able to filter it out for statistics, but that won't solve the problem of excess traffic generated from this practice.